continued from previoius issue
Constitution: A traditional way of defining the chronic miasms is as constitutional weaknesses or predispositions that may or may not make their presence known. As the basic energy that underlies the phenomenal world exists in two forms, latent and active, so the miasms can remain in dormancy or be actively expressing.
In his treatise on the chronic miasms Allen has described predisposition: “A predisposition is a bad habit formed in a life force that has been under the promptings of some subversive force for years of miasmatic action, and the changes that are common to its subversion. Thus the subtle patterns that are in the unconscious and conscious mind determine the underlying patterns of the basic energy fields of the individual.”
Dhawale’s interpretation of Hahnemann’s definition of miasm is: “The term miasm was employed by him to indicate a defect in constitution that interfered with the processes of recovery and cure.”
Furthermore, Edward Whitmont defines constitution as: “The inherent tendency to respond automatically along qualitatively predetermined individual, characteristic patterns. Constitutional differences are different response patterns to identical situations.
Susceptibility: The miasms attack and derange the central life force, thus making the organism susceptible to many other agents to develop functional and structural changes in individual tissues or organs. Stuart Close has defined susceptibility as the general quality of capability of the living organism to receive impressions, the power to react to stimuli. “By means of this power the organism offers resistance to everything that tends to injure or destroy its integrity or disturb its normal functioning. Resistance is manifested by sufferings, pain, fever, inflammation, changed secretions.”
Robert Virchow revolutionized mid-nineteenth century pathology with his theory of cellular pathology. Virchow was reluctant to accept the new bacteriology that emphasized external infecting agents as primary causative factors of disease. His belief was that disease resulted from disturbance of the normal physiological processes of the cell. He therefore maintained that it was the constitution of the host, or in other words intrinsic factors that played the dominant role in the manifestation of disease.
Charles Creighton, a British pathologist in the late nineteenth century refused altogether to acknowledge that bacteria were the cause of disease and only went so far as to admit they were sometimes concomitants of it. In his opinion, those diseases that did not arise from conditions in the external environment, resulted from a persistent physiological disturbance that somehow developed autonomy as a disease.
Allen’s query to Virchow was: “ . . . what disturbed the cell; how do cells become deceased when often, there is no external apparent cause; why do cells form tumors and abnormal growths; what is that power that is behind the cell change and disturbance?” That potentiality that is behind the cell is the thing that Virchow did not see. We can call that potentiality behind the cell prana, and the potentiality that disturbs prana we can call miasms.
Dr. Barbara Bova, HOD, Dept. of Homeopathy
to be continued.